Meta-change
Now here’s something I didn’t expect to see when I woke up this morning:
“Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards: Company outlines new approach to make standards-based rendering the default mode in Internet Explorer 8, will work with Web designers and content developers to help with standards behavior transition.”
Seriously, that’s the title and subhead of Microsoft’s latest press release.
About halfway through, there’s this from Ray Ozzie:…we have decided to give top priority to support for these new Web standards. In keeping with the commitment we made in our Interoperability Principles of being even more transparent in how we support standards in our products, we will work with content publishers to ensure they fully understand the steps we are taking and will encourage them to use this beta period to update their sites to transition to the more current Web standards supported by IE8.
See also the IEblog entry Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8, where Dean Hachamovitch says:
Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.
We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action.
In other words, the IE team seems to have used recent Microsoft PR efforts to their, and our, advantage.
I’m relieved and glad on the one hand, and a little worried on the other. It’s not like the issues I discussed, or Jeffrey wrote about, have gone away. It’s just that the way in which they’re handled by IE has shifted—which in some ways is a huge difference.
I think what worries me most is the possibility that when the public beta hits, there will be enough incompatibility problems that pushback from other constiuencies forces a change back to the original behavior. I hope not. I hope that what will happen is that any problems that come up will be addressed by spreading the news far and wide that there’s a simple one-line fix for those sites.
I’m glad that IE will act as browsers have always done, and default to the latest and greatest in the absence of any explicit direction to the contrary. I’m doubly glad that the IE team is willing to do that, even knowing what they have to handle. And I’m triply glad that the proposal was made in public ahead of time, with plenty of opportunity for debate, so that we could have a chance to weigh in and affect the browser’s behavior.
